Results on Claasen's -nocairo patches

["Matt Hoosier" <mwhoosier gmail com>]

About tens days ago, Matthias Claasen posted a series of patches which
reverted some common drawing operations to use GDK calls rather than
Cairo. I'm referring particularly to the following post:

 http://mail.gnome.org/archives/performance-list/2006-July/msg00000.html

I've done a little bit of benchmarking using the attached program (be
sure to give the --overlay-widgets switch on its command line). If
you'll ignore the portion of that program which animates GdkImage's
onto the background of a window, the remainder of it essentially
counts the number of times per second that a GtkButton can be painted.

Without the -nocairo patches from Matthias's posts, I get about 65
frames per second on some ARM hardware with a 320x240x16 display.
Applying the patches, I get about 85 frames per second. I used the
X.org KDrive server from the 7.1 release. (If anybody wants the gory
details on which extensions were supported, I can supply those too.)

I understand that the consensus (reached earlier) among this group is
that the dashed line which indicates focus on a button is the culprit
on non-FPU Cairo systems. So the patch which backports the default Gtk
style (probably gtk_default_draw_focus) is likely the big helper here.

--Matt